Here’s a quick look at a few things do to in Ho Chi Minh as we only stayed a few days on a stopover from Hong Kong to Da Nang. There’s not a great number of things to do in Ho Chi Minh, especially with kids, so I booked the Can Gio Mangrove Forest Tour from a company called Les Rives Authentic River Experience. You can find out the details of the tour here but keep reading because I’m probably going to put you off it. Firstly, the tour is not cheap, all up, for 3 adults and 1 child the total cost was 23,990,000 Vietnamese Dong. That’s over USD$1,000! Okay, so being the anti-social nerds we are, we asked for a private tour, so that made quite a difference, but I for one didn’t want to be locked into a 7-9 hour tour and have to wait for other knobs to take 2 hrs to eat their lunch and spend 1 hour at every historic site we came across. So I guess we paid to have the boat to ourselves, still but USD$1000 in Vietnam is crazy. Now to be fair we knew this before going, so if we really weren’t that happy about we could have not done the tour or joined some other nerds. Still, I don’t know of any things to do in Ho Chi Minh that cost USD$1000 so it was probably doomed from the start.
Can Gio Mangrove Forest Tour
I pretty much anticipated what the tour would be like, it says 7-9 hrs, and I knew that there wouldn’t be 7-9 hrs worth of shit to see on any Mangrove Tour even if it was on the moon. When you have a private boat you can do whatever you want, leave early and when you’re done with one attraction you can just piss off and not have to worry about the boffin who wants to spend an hour chatting with the local fruit lady. So anyway, got picked up on time and the guide was nice. Took a 10 minute drive to the boat and hopped on, nice boat, life jackets, water, fruits, and off we went, good start. Basically you boat up the mekong river for about 45 minutes, it’s nice, but get’s a bit boring after a while.
First up you stop at a local market, it’s not that different than any local market in any SE Asian developing country, but I must say I quite liked this one, massive bull frogs and other street “food” for Grobbler to see and he loved it. That took about an hour max, although actually I could have stayed longer and took some photos. Back on the speed boat and then traveling into the Mekong Delta mangroves.
Can Gio Mangrove Forest Tour Market
We then get off the speedboat and board a smaller paddle boat to get taken through the mangroves and end up at the highlight of the trip, feeding the crocodiles. You get off the boat then board what is essentially a square cage and get taken out a bit where you lure crocodiles to jump out of the water and bite bits of fish of a stick. It’s all very unnatural and I’m not usually into this kind of thing but it was actually quite good, you’re protected by big steel cages so no or very little chance of getting harmed unless you did something stupid, but it’s a bit of entertainment having the crocodiles leaping out of the water at you. All good fun but again, not very natural.
After that you head to another place for some shit lunch at a local restaurant. What pissed us off a bit was they made us pay for an ice-cream. For fucks sake! We’ve just forked out USD$1,000 and they want to make us pay for a bloody ice cream. If it wasn’t for that, the trip would have been okay and wouldn’t have left such a sour taste in the mouth. Anyway, I’m sure you’re supposed to but we didn’t tip the guide at the end because of that. We probably would have given him a nice big tip, maybe USD$25-50, but because he made us pay for an ice-cream, he got shafted! If you’re looking for things to do in Ho Chi Minh, it’s possibly worth doing if you have kids and can’t find any other things to do in Ho Chi Minh for them, but otherwise, I’d say give it a miss. Way (WAYYYYYYY) over-priced.
Outside of this tour, we really only had half a day and couldn’t fit in much other things to do in Ho Chi Minh even if we wanted to. We spent that walking around the city, it was Chinese New Year so they had some celebrations going on and the area around the Park Hyatt has lots happening. Actually we spent a night on the way back from Danang at another hotel, but didn’t do too much there as it was out of the city.
Overall, I’d have to say I’d go back to Ho Chi Minh and spend a bit more time on some more local sights.
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